Sharron Wilkins Conrad, Ph.D.
Dr. Sharron Wilkins Conrad
I am an Associate Professor of History at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas, and a Senior Fellow at Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History.
In 2019 I received my Ph.D. in Humanities from The University of Texas at Dallas. My fields of study include American Presidents and Civil Rights, 1789–Present; 18th–20th Century African American Literature and Criticism; and American History Through Film.
My teaching and research interpret how the Civil Rights Movement intersects with the American Presidency. My book manuscript, The Trinity: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and African American Memory, explores the ways perceptions of Kennedy and Johnson’s civil rights leadership developed, hardened, and still circulates within the African-American community.
The approach I take is interdisciplinary, using oral histories, memoirs, letters, music, films, newspapers, magazines, public polling data, photographs, and visual art to illuminate how memories serve as hidden transcripts that communicate which aspects of the past are worthy of reverence, and which are not.
Photo: JFK Presidential Library and Museum
publications
"He Gave His Life for Us": The Civil Rights Martyrdom of John F. Kennedy
in
Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture
February 2023
American Quarterly
"More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination"
June 2023 (vol. 75, no. 2) pp. 279-307
